“No; go on; you bore me when you make jokes; you’re interesting me very much now.” “I should have tried to find throughout nature the dividing line, below which nothing exists. An example will show you what I mean. The newspapers the other day had an account of a workman who was electrocuted. He was handling some live wires carelessly; the voltage was not very high; but it seems his body was in a state of perspiration. His death is attributed to the layer of humidity which enabled the current to envelop his body. If his body had been drier, the accident wouldn’t have taken place. But now let’s imagine the perspiration added drop by drop.... One more drop--there you are!” “I don’t understand,” said Olivier. “Because my example is badly chosen. I always choose my examples badly. Here’s another: Six shipwrecked persons are picked up in a boat. They have been adrift for ten days in the storm. Three are dead; two are saved. The sixth is expiring. It was hoped he might be restored to life; but his organism had reached the extreme limit.” “Yes, I understand,” said Olivier. “An hour sooner and he might have been saved.” “An hour! How you go it! I am calculating the extremest point. It is possible. It is still possible.... It is no longer possible! My mind walks along that narrow ridge. That dividing line between existence and non-existence is the one I keep trying to trace everywhere. The limit of resistance to--well, for instance, to what my father would call temptation. One holds out; the cord on which the devil pulls is stretched to breaking.... A tiny bit more, the cord snaps--one is damned. Do you understand now? A tiny bit less--non-existence. God would not have created the world. Nothing would have been. ‘The face of the world would have been changed,’ says Pascal. But it’s not enough for me to think--‘if Cleopatra’s nose had been shorter.’ I insist. I ask: shorter, by how much? For it might have been a tiny bit shorter, mightn’t it?... Gradation; gradation; and then a sudden leap.... _Natura non fecit saltus._ What absurd rubbish! As for me, I am like the Arab in the desert who is dying of thirst. I am at that precise point, you see, when a drop of water might still save him ... or a tear....” His voice trailed away; there had come into it a note of pathos which surprised Olivier and disturbed him. He went on more gently--almost tenderly: “You remember: ‘I shed that very tear for thee....’” Olivier remembered Pascal’s words; he was even a little put out that his friend had not quoted them exactly. He could not refrain from correcting: “‘I shed that very drop of blood for thee....’” Armand’s emotion dropped at once. He shrugged his shoulders: “What can we do? There are some who get through with more than enough and to spare.... Do you understand now what it is to feel that one is always ‘on the border line’? As for me, I shall always have one mark too little.”